he critics of modern systematics are many, but their legitimate points are few. Some say
systematics is a field that is old, uninteresting, dusty, and not scientific. These people are wrong on three counts, and right on one. They are wrong that systematics is uninteresting. When a feathered dinosaur is discovered in a Chinese fossil bed, or a new monkey is found in the forests of Brazil, this becomes the cover of the next issue of Nature or Science. The reason for this notoriety is systematics, not biochemistry, molecular genetics, or any other field. They are wrong that systematics is dusty: The contentious and fast-moving fields of methodology of systematics and DNA technology have revolutionized modern phylogenetics. Indeed, whenever there is a new concept based on new data and requiring a change in taxonomy, critics of systematics object to learning a new name (they liked the old one so much! ), and therefore object to the growth of systematics because of its dynamic nature. They are wrong that systematics is unscientific. Systematic matrices of dozens of taxa and hundreds of characters represent the most thoroughly examined hypotheses in all of modern science, because every character in every species serves to confirm or refute the hypothesis of relationship. By comparison, whereas a phylogenetic hypothesis may have thousands of verified predictions, most experiments in all the rest of biology have a handful of confirmatory trials to rely upon.
ritics are right that systematics is old (it has aged two and a half centuries since Linnaeus),
but this maturity requires the most demanding scholarship in all of biology. It is not enough to know the recent work in a given field; one must know all the history, every author (good or bad), every respective species concept, every paper in any language the authors used, every vague meaning of such words as "transition," every study of comparative physiology, every life history strategy, every nuance of climatology of South Africa, the history of human colonization of the Pacific, the tectonic history of the Antilles, the historic sea levels in the Indonesian archipelago, and anything else that ever touches the taxa under study. Yes, it is an old science, and therefore should be awarded, more respect, not less.
ystematics is a particularly difficult field because its central goal is to make sense of all the
biological variation we observe around us. This substantially exceeds climatology, geology, chemistry, and physics (because of the "variation" part) and leads to some awkward situations. Systematics aspires to organize variation in a hierarchy that will have maximum explanatory power, but there are at least two serious pitfalls. First, as with the other sciences, biology sometimes finds that nature did not leave behind enough information to make well-supported statements regarding isolated data. Historical questions (like those of systematics) are famous in this regard because if no one was there to see the process in question, it might be impossible to reconstruct it with security. Second, people are so exceptionally talented at seeing patterns (even when there is actually no pattern) that they handsomely support casinos, state lotteries, and bad taxonomy by the millions.

s modern systematists, we must fulfill three goals consistent with the general idea of the

"scientific method": 1 ) bring all reliable data into competition to demonstrate their global strength without favoring some data and penalizing others a priori; 2) rely upon the basic principles of the scientific method to judge competing solutions, particularly Occam's razor that the simplest solution is to be preferred (the shortest phylogenetic tree); 3) if, in fact, the data are ambiguous or otherwise inadequate to solve a given problem, then say so, and do not make statements that are unsupported. The point of cladistic systematics is to formalize these goals, and to present a repeatable method that will produce phylogenies that are stable in the face of taxa and characters yet undiscovered or unexplored. This goal is not to be taken lightly, for if we sacrifice such stability, then we have made systematics less scientific. There is no point to classifying things if the classification will change every time someone sequences another gene or includes another species. Nor are the principles to be compromised for circumstances that a worker claims are "special," because the history of biological evolution is unique for every species, genus, family, etc., and if we easily trade away our standards for "special" cases, then we will soon have no standards at all.
etractors of cladistic methods generally rely on pleas that violate the three simple rules
outlined above, and their arguments commonly make the following claims: 1) data are "good" or "bad" based on external theory, and the data are not examined to see what hierarchy they form by themselves, 2) reject Occam's razor, the principle that the simplest solution is to be preferred (the parsimonious tree in a phylogenetic context), 3) present an unambiguous solution, whether or not the data are adequate to support it. In short, they claim that each study, one by one (and hence, every study in the aggregate), is "special" with respect to the cold criteria of scientific method, and thereby they nullify the "scientific" part of the "scientific method."
he future of systematics surely lies in embracing the same rigorous criteria as other
scientific fields, not bargaining out of them. Cladistic methods, like them or not, are here to stay.